I confess I have not read the book A Choice over Our Heads, but the resonant title of Lawrence Butler’s book chimed in my brain the other day, when I first hearing about Sequoia Village. The project is an attempt to combine affordable housing and the philosophy of co-housing, a semi-communal way of living in which people agree to contribute labor, such as cooking one day for a week in exchange for communal meals the rest of the time.
This concept left me thinking about the dilemma of choice — or lack of it — in the standard model of low- and moderate-income housing.
Now, I think the nonprofit builders who create housing for low- and moderate-income households walk only a little lower than the angels, given the extreme difficulty of financing and winning political support to supply one of society’s most critical needs. At the same time, I also think there is something unintentionally paternalistic, even authoritarian, about affordable housing as an institution. That is to say, working-class folks do not get many choices about where they can live. Homebuilders, understandably eager to stretch their scarce construction dollars, tend to build affordable residences in the form of “stacked flats,” which are two rows of identical apartments, separated by a hallway, with access to light and air from one wall only. In addition, you may not know your neighbors. Worse, you may have reason to fear them. But if you are on the list for an affordable unit, the builder says: “This is where you are going to live—and you should be grateful.”
Given this mindset, co-housing may seem like an odd choice for affordable housing. In a co-housing arrangement, residents agree (as distinct from being obliged) to prepare communal meals on certain days and clean up on others. Co-housing participants may also commit themselves to other tasks, such as doing landscape work on common areas. But it’s all voluntary, as each unit is fully self-contained.
The advantages of co-housing might seem obvious, at least to anyone who has been single, or a single parent, or part of a married couple that works full-time while raising children. Spending one evening a week cooking for a crowd is a great trade-off for communal meals the rest of the time (as long as you are not a salesperson who lives on the road, or an associate lawyer who works until midnight). It’s also practical to know your neighbors well enough to borrow a cup of sugar without embarrassment.
The promised rewards of co-housing, however, go beyond the practical to the personal and ethical. Promoters of co-housing like to call these places “communities of choice” and people who live in this communitarian way of life typically seek it out. In other words, the communitarian way of life is an end in itself. Residents of co-housing place a high value on the idea (or ideal) of community, perhaps in memory of times when people tended to live in the same place for long periods of time and neighbors looked out for one another. Living in a tight-knit community may be a cure for isolation, even if not everyone has the commitment or the social skills to keep the communitarian ball bouncing.
Located near the apple orchards of Sonoma County, Sebastopol is one city with the right set of factors to foster co-housing. One factor is a tolerant and open-minded populace. Another, arguably, may be affluence.
“Sebastopol is a highly progressive place and seems to have a lot of people who are interested in issues such as healthy living, politics, and alternative housing,” said the city’s planning director, Kenyon Webster. The city is one of the few in the state to require, as opposed merely to allow, green building standards, including requirements for both capturing and partially purifying stormwater on-site. Given this forward-looking culture, it is not surprising that local government would have both the resources and the openness to lend a hand to non-standard housing types.
A few years ago, Sebastopol contributed a portion of its housing monies toward the first co-housing development, Two Acre Wood, which contained market-rate units. The success of that project emboldened the city to take a further step, and in August the Sebastopol City Council approved the city’s first affordable co-housing project, the 45-unit Petaluma Avenue. The developer is Affordable Housing Associates of Berkeley. The council followed shortly with approval of the 20-unit Sequoia Village, to be developed by Burbank Housing Development Corporation of Santa Rosa. All units in both projects are rentals.
Financing, the bugbear of many creative projects, turned out to be no problem. John Morgan, Burbank’s senior project manager for Sequoia Village, said he was “pleasantly surprised” by the lack of opposition from lenders.
“Once we explained the concept to them, they were fine with it,” Morgan said. “Their real concern was whether the single-family houses look attached.”
The lenders were concerned about the very dense arrangement of single-family homes in the project, in which houses are separated from one another by only two inches, which must set some kind of record. The site planner and architect is Michael Black, who has been active nationally in promoting co-housing.
The city contributed $1.6 million to the $7 million project. The city’s loan, which equals about $80,000 per house, will be paid back at 3% interest over a 59-year amortization. Morgan is hoping the units will be outfitted with photovoltaic cells for solar power if bond funding becomes available.
Morgan is frank about the possible stumbling blocks of affordable co-housing. People who participate in co-housing have often already formed “intentional communities” before the housing is built. It is far less typical to invite or persuade new people who may not know one another to take part in the communitarian way of life. And there is no guarantee that the new projects will fully succeed on a communitarian basis, even though the projects have large communal kitchens and tenant associations to pay for property management and maintenance.
I think the effort is worth the risk, though. In the worst case, this expensive Sonoma County city will have 65 new units of affordable housing, hardly a negative “outcome.” The more intriguing idea, however, is that affluent Sebastopol had enough respect for its residents to give them a choice in where and how to live. It is a risk worth repeating in other parts of California. Granted, co-housing may not appeal to everyone in our intensely private society, but I suspect its appeal is broader than just a few dozen households in Sebastopol.
